World escaped nuclear weapons threat: Moon

MNA International Desk: South Korean President Moon Jae-In said on Thursday the world had escaped the threat of war after this week’s Singapore summit, echoing US President Donald Trump’s upbeat assessment of his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Trump and Kim issued a joint statement after their historic meeting that reaffirmed the North’s commitment to “work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”, an end to joint US-South Korean military exercises and gave US guarantees of security to North Korea.

“There have been many analyses on the outcome of the summit but I think what’s most important was that the people of the world, including those in the United States, Japan and Koreans, have all been able to escape the threat of war, nuclear weapons and missiles,” Moon told U. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ahead of a meeting between the two in Seoul.

The summit statement provided no details on when Pyongyang would give up its nuclear weapons programme or how the dismantling might be verified.

Skeptics of how much the meeting achieved pointed to the North Korean leadership’s long-held view that nuclear weapons are a bulwark against what it fears are US plans to overthrow it and unite the Korean peninsula.

“I am confident that we took a very good, significant step in Singapore,” Pompeo told Moon on Thursday.

Pompeo said a day earlier he would like to accomplish major nuclear disarmament in North Korea within Trump’s current term.